News Breaker: Swarup Choudhury

Varsha Chidambaram |
Aug. 27, 2013

Swarup Choudhury, MD, Thomson Reuters, is a strong believer in IT's ability to help the company stay ahead of competition.

Thomson Reuters is known as the company that owns the world's most trusted news source, Reuters. But not only does the company generate and distribute news from all corners, it also derives intelligence embedded in content, and delivers it across the value chain. The man at the helm, Swarup Choudhury, MD, Thomson Reuters, is a strong believer in IT's ability to help the company stay ahead of competition. Sharp, suave, and straight shooting, Choudhury was a blue-eyed IBM boy who joined Thomson Reuters in 2012. He is spearheading a cross-section of businesses in India all on the nimble shoulders of technology.

CIO: Thomson Reuters is known as a news company. Can you elaborate what you bring to the table outside of news? Swarup Choudhury: You're right. Thomson Reuters is known for its news, but we are actually a trusted intelligent information company. Most traditional companies have a three-tier architecture. The first-tier is the infrastructure, the second is the application layer, and third is the business layer. We, as a company, are split into five layers. Our first layer is data, which is now called the big data; on top of the data we do curation of the data, on top of curation of data we do analytics, on top of that we do workflow, and then the fifth and final layer is transaction. That is one way of looking at us as a company. You claim to be an IT company driven by news. How does content and IT form the core of your other businesses? For us, news is content in a digital form. It could be text, voice, or video. But there is other content apart from news that is primarily based on IT. Take our services in the financial space for example. One of the things we provide is a terminal called EIKON that helps all classes of traders--financial analysts, financial traders, operators, and people who operate in the financial divisions of companies. We provide data feeds on all asset classes, right from equities, to bonds, to derivatives, to fixed income, across different platforms. News is content. Digitized news is the core that differentiates us from the rest. We give our audience something important to deliver value and be more productive.

CIO: Can you give us some examples of how IT has helped you extend new services? Swarup Choudhury: There are many examples. One that comes to mind is in the financial sector. We're pioneers with the best database for KYC. We have an offering called World Check that is used by people globally and my mission is to increase its awareness in India. It tracks all transactions including aberrant transactions and transactions you don't want to support. For governance, we have a solution that helps external board members communicate. Today, external board members receive important communications on their personal IDs, thus increasing the risk of leakage of privileged and confidential information. With our solution, we extend a board-link which is a highly secure 122-bit architecture platform through which all board members can connect and talk to each other in a secured environment. This is prevalent abroad, but we are trying to get that consciousness here.